Have a look at this camera image of the volcano on White Island – spot anything unusual ?

How about the cute pink dinosaur at the bottom left of the image ? 🙂

There’s an ABC News story about it here.

What a few weeks! Asides from all the usual work we’ve been out and about as Donna did a talk in Ballarat the Friday after we came back from the US/UK and then the weekend after she did a keynote and two workshops at the inaugural ABIQ conference in Brisbane in Queensland (with a special thanks to Michael Chan for being a wonderful host).

This weekend we allowed outselves a more restful time, including some arty stuff by going to see Whitehorse Musical Theatre’s production of "Les Misérables" which was excellent! You’d be forgiven for thinking that you weren’t seeing a professional cast, they got a standing ovation at the end.

Today (Sunday) we headed over to Toorak in Melbourne to see the Toorak Village Festival of Sculpture where they exhibit various sculptures in shop windows and arcades. There were supposed to be 90 in total but we only managed to find about 80 odd, probably because it was a Sunday and the rest were in dark, locked up shops..

The New York Times is reporting that the Walt Disney Company is trying to prevent Miramax Film Corporation from distributing Michael Moore’s new film
Fahrenheit 9/11.

Apparently (according to the NYT) "Disney, which bought Miramax more than a decade ago, has a contractual agreement with the Miramax principals, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, allowing it to prevent the company from distributing films under certain circumstances, like an excessive budget or an NC-17 rating.". They also say
"Mr. Moore’s agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney’s chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush’s brother, Jeb, is governor."

Michael Moore himself has written on his website about this in his own inimitable style. Ironically whilst Disney is trying to block the film in the US it appears that it will be distributed to other countries, they (fortunately) do not appear to be able to prevent that. Unfortunately this isn’t a case where the US’s famous "First Amendment" applies as this isn’t the US Government trying to supress expression, it is a corporation and so it doesn’t apply here.

Update: The BBC is carrying an article about the fact that the film will be distributed in the UK.

The ABC News is reporting that the Australian government has stopped funding Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) on
cheaper solar cells, the Great Barrier Reef and Rainforests because of a lack of commerical outcomes for their research.

It would appear that they want CRCs to focus on “commercial outcomes” (i.e. products) rather than finding important things out. 🙁

Of course, this comes at the same time that CSIRO has appointed a director of communications who said as a lawyer for tobacco companies "I do not believe that cigarette smoking is an addiction, based on any reasonable definition," before a Senate committee in 1994. Not to mention the fact that Australia’s Chief Scientist is also Chief Technologist for Rio Tinto, the mining giant, for whom he still works 3 days a week.

Now the fact that Rio Tinto are heavily promoting carbon sequestration and the fact that the solar power CRC had it’s funding scrapped is, of course, complete coincidence. But this looks suspicious and I strongly believe that such apparent conflict of interests should not be permitted.

One of the emails I spotted whilst doing a quick scan of my email backlog was from the UK’s National Archives which has an exhibition called Secret State about the Cold War. It caught my eye because of this little gem.

Britain had the idea of building a 7 ton nuclear landmine, but there were worries about some of the delicate parts getting too cold, so some bright spark came up with the idea of keeping it warm with live chickens. Of course, there was no food or air supply for the chickens, so you could say the active parts of the device had two different half-lives… 🙁

The exhibition is open until the 31st October.